Edited and with an introduction by John Belton. Movies and Mass CultureJohn Belton Introduction ‘This book looks at the way(s) in which American identity shapes and is shaped by motion pictures. Of course, an American national identity predates the advent of motion pictures. Its construction begins with the first encounters that European, English, and other non-Native Americans had with the American landscape, with one another, and with Native Americans. It is also quite obvious that this identity remains in the process of formation; it is continually coming into being, taking shape, and changing shape. And American identity does this across a cultural horizon that extends beyond the relatively narrow borders of the cinema; the American character is formed within the larger context of American, culture as a whole. But aspects of it surface in the movies. The movies play a crucial role in its construction, in its representation/re-presenta: tion, and in its transmission, ‘The relationship between motion pictures and culture remains complex. The movies are an integral part of mass culture and are embedded within it. One does not produce the other, rather, each inter- acts with the other, and they mutually determine one another. If films and filmmakers produce culture, they are also produced by it. Thus it is impossible to separate films and filmmakers from the society within which they exist. As Andre Bazin noted in his essay on notions of authorship in the cinema, “The individual transcends society, but soci- ety is also and above all within him. So there can be no definitive criticism of genius or talent which does not first take into consideration thesocial determinism, the historical combination of circumstances, and the technical background which to a large extent determine it”! ‘National identity is neither single nor constant in nature; it is ‘not monolithic but complex, and it changes from one period to the next. For example, America’s sense of itself shifted in the 1910s and 1920s 12 ih Raion along with the movement ofits population from rural to urban areas. It became an urban nation, yet it continued to conceive of itself as an agrarian state. In the early 1950s, white-collar workers began to outnum- ber blue-collar workers for the first time in U.S. history. By 1956, more than 75 percent of adult Americans—including lower-class, blue-collar workers—began to think of themselves as middle class. Again, at mid- century, America’s self-image underwent a face-lift of sorts, here in a way that exceeded changes in actual class status. Even today, most Ameri- cans—even those with incomes just barely above the poverty level—tend to identify themselves as middle class—in large part because their values are middle class. In the 1990s, American demographics shifted yet again as population shifted from the cities to the suburbs. With this move, an urbanized, industrialized America also began to redefine itself as a gcographically diverse mass society, built on a service rather than an industrial economy. At the same time, it began to embrace the de- centralized structure of a new age—the Age of Information—electroni- cally linked together by means of a communications superhighway of telephones, cables, and computers ‘As a comerstone of the communications industry, the movies have always played a crucial role in the process of this changing identity- formation. They not only serve as texts that document who we think we are or were, but also reflect changes in our self-image, tracing the transformation from one kind of America to another. Contemporary audiences can see in older films different styles of dress, different modes of behavior, and different notions of what it meant to be an American. These differences do not merely consist of the superficial recognition that, in the olden days, women bobbed their hair, men wore double- breasted suits and drove 1948 Packards, and everyone dialed rotary telephones, listened to swing music, and was obsessed with cigarette smoking. More important, the movies assist audiences in negotiating major changes in identity; they carry them across difficult periods of cultural transition in such a way that a more or less coherent national identity remains in place, spanning the gaps and fissures that threaten to disrupt its movement and to expose its essential disjointedness. ‘As twentieth-century Americans, we live in and belong toa mass culture, Yet we conceive of ourselves as unique individuals, defined in large part by our intimate relationship to smaller social units or institu- tions—to our families, our friends, and our local communities—and by our larger identification with a specific class, race, gender, and/or ethnic3 Inivoducon group. The one way in which we tend not to define ourselves is in terms of our alienated relationship to mass society. In other words, we live in astate of denial, acknowledging those aspects of our identity that confirm our uniqueness and repressing those that deny it Ideology, or the system|s) of beliefs that individuals hold about the real conditions of their existence, plays a major role in this confirma- tion of our identity. Those beliefs may be true or false, or a combination of both. Itis often difficult to distinguish between beliefs and facts. Even science, which distinguishes itself from ideology in precisely these terms {ic., science consists of “facts” and ideology of “beliefs”, is necessarily ideological, its assumptions often shaped by individual or social beliefs.” ‘The truth of one’s beliefs remains secondary to their credibility, to whether or not they are believed. In this sense, ideology determines an individual's or a society’s understanding of the world in which he or she orit lives, ‘As a mass identity within a modem, fully industrialized mass culture, American identity conceives of itself according to certain Amer- ican myths or systems of cultural beliefs. There is no single myth or system of belief that “explains” American identity. The notion of what it means to be “American” is as diverse as its population, America is and remains a multiethnic mass. Indeed, the American experience includes the unique encounters with America of New England Protestants, Irish orltalian-American Catholics, middle-European Jews, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, women, latinos/Hispanics, gays, and lesbians. But from one perspective, atleast, this multiethnic mass shared one common experience—that of modemity. The experience of moder- nity for most Americans came in the form of their reactions to the profound changes introduced into the nation's social, cultural, and eco- ‘nomic structure by the rapid industrialization and urbanization that took place during the period from the Civil War until World War 1. These reactions were complex, combining a positive enthusiasm for the prog: ress and growth associated with these developments and a gnawing fear of the effects these changes might have on traditional American values. ‘The trauma initiated by this rapid industrialization and urban: ization prompted the emergence of two major myths or systems of belief that tended to dominate ways of thinking about the American experience before, during, and after World War I. These systems of belief, with only minor variation, also tended to dominate Hollywood narratives during the crucial period of the development of classical Hollywood cinema (ca 1896-1917}* and have remained significant from that period until the4 John Baton present.5 These ideologies were themselves dominant during the period in which the cinema itself became a mass art and in which the film- makers who created classical Hollywood cinema were raised. Individual filmmakers react in a variety of ways to these ideolo- ssies, as do specific film genres and film stars. At the same time, each period of American film history provides its own way of understanding ‘American identity in relation to the nation’s transformation into a mass society that has been shaped in response to the advent of mass culture. Because motion pictures shape and are shaped by mass culture, they define themselves in terms of these dominant ideologies, sometimes reflecting them and sometimes calling them into question. From the 1890s until 1914, American political thought was shaped by two major reform movements—populism and progressivism, ‘These ideologies existed within a field of other ideologies with which they interact, but they have emerged as dominant. Indeed, populism achieved such widespread power as a system of beliefs that it has been described by historians as “the American ideology.” Populism and progressivism dominated American thought, in large part, because they both identified and confronted problems crucial to an emerging national identity. Both populism and progressivism addressed the nation’s anxie- ties over its cataclysmic transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy, from a nation of producers to one of consumers, and from a community of individuals to a mass society. ‘The politics of populism and progressivism were short lived, roughly spanning the period between the presidential campaigns of populist William Jennings Bryan (1896) and of two progressives, Theo- dore Roosevelt {1904/1912} and Woodrow Wilson (1912/1916). But as systems of belief, the ideologies of populism and progressivism outlived the rise and fall the Populist and Progressive political parties. It is primarily as myths, or as ideologies, that they found their way into motion picture narratives; thus, it is primarily as ideologies (not as political movements) that they are discussed here. Populist ideology was rooted in the ideals of the Jeffersonian democratic tradition. Thomas Jefferson envisioned America as “a repub- lic of yeoman farmers, each man working his own land, free to develop in his own way.”” For Jefferson, the moral virtue of the American citizenry depended on its association with the land. “I think our govern- ments,” he wrote, “will remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as they are chiefly agricultural... Cultivators ofthe earth are most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most5 Iniroducion virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” For Jefferson, the American character was rescued from the corruption and decadence of the Old World through regenerative contact, with Nature. But, more important, the land became, for him, the basis, on which American democracy was to be built, The availability of free land in the West guaranteed each American an opportunity to own land and, thereby, to have an equal stake in the affairs of the nation. The ‘universal ownership of property would not only empower Americans but censure their self-sufficiency and independence. Populist ideology looked back with nostalgia to the “lost Eden” of preindustrial agrarian America, to the nation of shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, and small towns that existed "before the development of indus- trialism and the commercialization of agriculture.”® As a reform move- ment, populism's response to industrialization and mass culture was reactionary rather than revolutionary. “ America [did] not need a revolu. tion,”” writes George McKenna, “for the simple reason that it {had} already had one. What it [did] need [was] @ restoration.” It needed to return to the values and beliefs of agrarian, small town America. In returning to the original values and beliefs of Revolutionary-era America, populism advocated “democracy, honest and unobtrusive central govern- ment, leadership by decent men, equality of opportunity, [and] self-help.” Responding to the postindustrial present, populism “opposed big busi- ness, the political machine and intellectualism as the things most likely to hamper the individual's pursuit of happiness.” However, the popu- list spirit was, in other ways, undemocratic. Populism attempted to address the interests of farmers, lower-class farm workers, and other elements of the rural population who had become increasingly frustrated by and discontented with the forces of industrialization." To these groups, the nation’s fall from grace was seen as the result of “a sustained conspiracy of the intemational money power” that deliberately op- pressed farmers and workers.'3 In other words, populist thought, as seen here, tended toward a certain paranoia, especially in its treatment of groups with different social or economic interests. Thus, it was anti-intellectual, racist, anti- Semitic, and xenophobic.'* Populist rhetoric informs the revivalistic fundamentalism of William Jennings Bryan, the anticommunist of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and the segregationism of Gov. George Wallace." The racism of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) has its origins in the populist desire to retum to a “lost Eden.” According to6 Jak Belton the film's initial intertitles, the harmony of Eden/America is disrupted by “the bringingof the African to America,” which “planted the first seed of disunion.” The film ends with a vision of the millennium, in which ‘war, strife, and African-Americans have been banished and in which Christ appears, reinstituting his reign on earth and restoring the “lost Eden"! The popularity of The Birth of a Nation gives testimony to the power of Griffith’s social and historical vision, but the racist aspects of this vision were rejected by a significant number of Americans, including African- Americans, members of the clergy, intellectuals, and progressive reformers.!” Today, audiences adamantly refuse to accept the film’s racism, It is important to remember that audiences regularly resist and occasionally reject the ideological “messages” present in motion pic- tures. Certain aspects of populist or progressive thought were clearly not embraced by all Americans. Populist values and beliefs may not necessarily enter the cinema through Griffith, but in him they find one of their most powerful advocates, Griffith's A Comer in Wheat (1906), for example, lays bare the exploitation of the rural farmers and the urban poor by the greedy manipulation of a speculator in the grain market. As Tom Gunning has pointed out, the film draws on William Jennings Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech of 1896. Its narrative contrasts “the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in the spring and toils, allsummer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth” with “the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain.” Griffith’s narrative ‘weaves scenes of the farmer, idealized within a natural landscape {where he sifts grain through his fingers and sows his fields), and those of the speculator, isolated from the world of nature (and from the honest toil of the working class) in claustrophobic urban interiors Griffith’s film exposes the corruption and greed of those who manipulate the grain market. And it opposes the rich and the poor, revealing the exploitation by “the haves” of the “have-nots.” Yet it is clearly populist, not Marxist. It provides no analysis of the economic relations between capitalists and farmers; it does not explore the ideo- logical underpinnings of the system that governs the production, distri- bution, and consumption of grain. Instead, it melodramatizes these relations, suggesting that the plight of impoverished farmers and con- sumers is the result of individual villainy, rather than of any flaw in the capitalist system. Thus, Nature, in the form of the grain in which theInivoduction speculatoris “drowned,” destroys the villain. In this way, Nature secures a form of social justice that is eloquently poetic. But, more important, Griffith’s logic suggests that the system (capitalist free enterprise] works, ifitis only run properly by a benign and morally virtuous individual. The film ends, as it began, with the image of the farmer sowing his field Although the farmer is left impoverished and exhausted, corruption has, been eliminated, The agrarian economy is now free to function naturally, providing an adequate living for the farmer and reasonably priced bread for the consumer. Within mainstream American thought, capitalism works, but it just sometimes goes a bit crazy. Populists and progressives sought to correct its excesses. Thus, they fought those forces within the economic and social order that abused the system. In this way, both populists and progressives shared common enemies. They both opposed monopolies and trusts; industrial and financial capitalists; railroads and robber bar- ons; large corporations and corrupt political machines. Because they both target the same individuals or groups as villains, itis not always easy to distinguish that which is populist in the cinema from that which is progressive. Of course, populists and progressives can be distinguished from one another in several ways. Historically, they belonged to different social and geographical groups. Populists, such as the midwesterner Bryan, tended to espouse the moral and religious values of rural, work- ing-class America, whereas Progressives, such as the casterner Teddy Roosevelt, represented the interests of a more privileged, urban class. Progressive reform began in the cities, where the effects of industrializa- tion and urbanization had led to the creation of slums and exploitative labor practices. The Populist movement, which began in the South and the West, sought to regulate the railroads, to protect farmers land, later, factory workers} from big business interests, and to introduce a graduated income tax that would ensure that corporations and the wealthiest Americans would pay their fair share of taxes. Yet, despite these differ- ences, they share a common cause. The minor features that mark them as unique political movements disappear in the larger process of their transformation into ways of describing the American experience in terms of traditional narrative formats. Thus, to agreatextent, American cinema draws on both of them, blurring their differences and fusing them into a common ideological strand. Asa result, many American films combine populist with pro- gressive thinking. Thus, even the populist vision of A Comer in Wheat8 Jin Beton ‘owes much to progressivism. Its narrative is based on the muckraking journalistic fiction of Frank Nomis, the author of naturalistic Zolaesque ‘works such as “A Deal in Wheat” (1903), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1902). Norris wrote frequently for McClure’s, a leading muckraking, magazine that published progressive essays by Ida Tarbell, who wrote a famous expose of Standard Oil, and Lincoln Steffens, who wrote about urban political corruption.” As historian Richard Hofstadter notes, “The fundamental eritical achievement of American Progressivism was the business of exposure. ... journalism was the chief occupational source of its writers, ... and] the muckraker was a central figure.”2! Progressives such as Norris sought reform through exposure. They believed that public opinion could be educated and that the disclosure of corruption was the first step leading to its elimination ™* American film has always performed a journalistic function, informing the populace about current events. This was as true of actuality films and newsreels as it was about topical narratives of the 1930s, such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang |1932, which exposed the corruption and brutality of the chain gang system, as well as those of the 1970s and 1980s, such as The China Syndrome (1979), which drew attention to the hazardous conditions within contemporary nuclear power plants, and Wall Street (1987), which looked at the ruthless practice of insider trading in the New York stock market. In each instance, exposure is understood to lead to reform. Although it is famous for other reasons, Citizen Kane (1941], which focusses on the career of a muckraking newspaper editor, tells the tale of the rise and fall of progressive activism. Kane may be understood as a populist in search of a “lost Eden’ (his youth with his mother in rural, preindustrial Colorado, circa 1870}. But during the course of the film, he adopts a progressive stance toward the excesses of industry and government. As the editor of a muckraking newspaper, he attempts to expose the traction trust, copper robbers, urban slumlords, and political bosses. He campaigns for governor, as he tells us, “to point out and make public, the dishonesty, the downright villainy of Boss jim Gettys’ polit- ical machine.” After refusing to be blackmailed into withdrawing from the race, Kane is himself exposed in the press as an adulterer. The film does expose the double standard of the progressive reform movement: the idealism of Kane's attempts at social and political reform is under- mined by his own moral hypocrisy. Yet, it also celebrates the energy and enthusiasm of well-intentioned reformers such as Kane. Once he is defeated in the election and retires from politics, Kane and the film lose their idealism and their spirited sense of social mission. pr itic leg sig uti leg mo leg nataking sque The king otea bout ‘The 4 the They reof bas bout was hain gang hina thin oked In 44), the ood the and sto ical ake site iim ont ler- and 8 Inivaduction ‘More recently, the progressive spirit has animated the contem. porary American documentary. Roger and Me (Moote, 1989) investigates the consequences of the closing of a General Motors truck plant in Flint, Michigan, which put 30,000 people out of work. The film intercuts scenes of unemployed auto workers playing basketball or being evicted from their homes with scenes depicting the elite of Flint society at the local country club. A modern muckraker, Moore's target is the CEO of General Motors, Roger Smith, who repeatedly evades the filmmaker’s attempts to interview him. The film targets big business as the enemy of working-class America and argues that the excesses of capitalism need to be reformed. In 1994, Moore extended his progressive project to television, adopting a “60 Minutes’ style approach to his lower-middle- class exposé of corporate America in “TV Nation.” ‘To some extent, progressives responded more positively to the industrial revolution than did populists. Progressive narratives featured characters who, through hard work, frugality, and industry, realized the American dream of success, epitomized in the Horatio Alger stories. Progressives believed that within an ideal capitalist state, an individual's integrity and energy would be rewarded with economic success. How- ever, industrial trusts and monopolies had “crooked” the economic ‘wheel in their own favor and prevented the individual entrepreneur from securing an appropriate reward for his orher efforts. Progressives insisted that legislation controlling monopolies and trusts was necessary to ensure that the playing field was kept level.” As Hofstadter notes, progressivism attempted “to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine, and with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was also believed to have been lost.""5 Unlike populism, which failed to engage with the political real- ities of postindustrial America, progressive activism was focussed on legislative reform. Progressives enacted legislation that regulated rail roads, raised corporate taxes, enacted child labor laws, demanded over- sight of the food industry, advocated the municipal ownership of public utilities, and campaigned for minimum wage and maximum work hours legislation. Although genuinely interested in the public's welfare, the ‘more extreme progressives sought the passage of restrictive laws that legislated morality. Indeed, Griffith was skeptical of the puritanical nature of Progressive reform, certain factions of which denounced the movies as unwholesome.”® Later, The Birth of a Nation was attacked as10 ihn Belion racist by many progressives, including Chicago's Jane Addams.” Efforts were made to prevent the film from being publicly screened and to force Griffith to delete certain scenes in which African-Americans were depicted as “brutal,” “vicious,” “grotesque,” and "despicable.”"8 Griffith viewed this attempt at censorship as an assault on free speech and responded, in the modem story of Intolerance (1916), with a denunciation of middle-class reform groups, which he saw as hypo- critical busy-bodies who sought to impose their own moral codes on the lower class. Like Griffith, populists tended to oppose the legislation of mo: tality. In their utopian vision of America, the common people possessed an innate morality that enabled them to tell right from wrong. An inherently vireuous people, Americans knew in their hearts what was, right and did not need laws, especially those imposed on them from above, to guide their actions.”° The populist heroes of Frank Capra and John Ford films enjoyed a special relationship to the truth, which they discovered merely by searching their own hearts, Laws were what other lesser individuals depended on for their Knowledge of what was right and wrong. More important, laws often became the tools that villains used to maintain power. Thus, populist heroes often opposed mundane civil laws, upholding, instead, a more transcendent morality. In Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford, 1939), for example, Lincoln {played by Henry Fonda) objects when the mother of his two young clients is on the witness stand and is being forced to reveal to the court which one of her sons was guilty of a murder. Lincoln intervenes with the prosecutor's relentless questioning, declaring that “I may not know much about the law, but Ido know what's right and what's wrong, ‘And what you're asking her to do is wrong!” Lincoln knows in his heart what is right and wrong. Thus, he refuses to participate in a legalistic lynching of those whose values, like his own, place them outside of the limited moral vision of the judicial system. In populist mythology, Lincoln emerges as the archetypal hero.°° ‘The son of a poor farmer, he maintained the values of agrarian America, remaining humble, honest, God-fearing, and simple. His homespun vireues and dogged attempts at self-betterment were rewarded with the presidency. Populist directors, such as Griffith, Ford, and Capra, are repeatedly drawn to the character of Lincoln. In his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln 1930}, Griffith portrayed Lincoln as.a quasi-messianic saviour of the nation, expanding and humanizing the image of Lincoln as”“the Great Heart,” which he developed earlier in The Birth of a Nation, Ford ret Horse (1 One Nig to Wash model tl Know th that. Inc populist dence,” perhaps, “moral: camed 0 the noti: Hollywe Hollywe lywood 1 who str. the cour, or with « or defea distincti traits, qt 1 the indi obvious film to 4 seriptior political stressed traditior who reec democra individu populist to the u behaviorn Inivoduc Ford retumed to the figure of Lincoln throughout his career (The Iron Horse [1924], Prisoner of Shark island (1934), Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Capra’sheroes, such as Peter Warne (Clark Gable] in It Happened (One Night (1934), and Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) in Mr Smith Goes to Washington |1939), invoke Lincoln as an ideal figure and attempt to ‘model their own behavior on his.*! Like Ford's young Mr. Lincoln, they know the truth and possess an unshakable moral authority because of that. Indeed, Jeff Smith's filibuster in the Senate, which cites essential populist texts ranging from the Bible to the “Declaration of Indepen- dence,” represents a tour de force of populist argumentation; it is, pethaps, the best example of what Cahiers du cinema referred to as a “moralizing discourse” in the American cinema.™ It is heartfelt and sincere, and it is delivered with a moral authority that the character has ceamed over the course of the film, Populist and progressive ideologies play a crucial role in shaping the notions of individuality, which serve as the foundation on which Hollywood narratives are based. David Bordwell has described classical Hollywood cinema as a character-centered cinema, “The classical Hol- Iywood film,” he argues, “presents psychologically defined individuals, who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. In the course of this struggle, the characters enter into conflict with others or with external circumstances. The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat... . The principal causal agency is thus the character, a distinctive individual endowed with an evident, consistent batch of traits, qualities, and behaviors.” Bordwell does not describe the nature, beliefs, or identity of the individuals who dominate classical Hollywood cinema for the obvious reason that these aspects of individual characters change from film to film. The idea of individuality that underlies Bordwell’s de- scription of classical Hollywood cinema draws on the intellectual and political thought of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which stressed the primacy of the individual. In the United States, this tradition was appropriated by Jefferson and other founding fathers, who reconceived the concept of individuality within an American {i.e., democratic) context. As we have already seen, Jefferson’s theory of the individual's status within a democracy was, in tum, rearticulated in populist and progressive thought. It was this thought that gave form to the uniquely “American” sense of individuality that governs the behavior and agency of the central characters found in American cinema,2 Joke Balion This sense of individuality is, however, illusory. It is an idealist construction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that survived into the twentieth century (and continues to survive today). It survived because it served a necessary function. It provided individuals witha sense of their uniqueness, autonomy, and agency—traits that were increasingly circumscribed by the mass society within which they lived. Characters in movies were empowered by their individual virtues and ‘were capable of intervening in and possibly even determining the course of events that took place in the films’ narratives. This kind of hero appears most frequently in the Western, a populist genre that itsclf dominated Hollywood, accounting for almost 25 percent of all American films made between 1926 and 1967. But this kind of hero tends to crop up regularly in other films as well. ‘The hero's sense of agency nuns, like a thread, through the body of American cinema. The movies tell us that the individual can make a difference, even within modern mass society. The hero can take on those “corporate” forces that would crush integrity and individuality and defeat them. In It's a Wonderful Life {Capta, 1946), George Bailey (James Stewart} triumphs over the ruthless banker, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barry- more}. The heroes of Star Wars (Lucas, 1977} defeat the evil Empire and later convert Darth Vader to the good side of “the Force.” Even the corrupt world of insider trading in Wall Street (Stone, 1987} can be reformed by the heroic efforts of one man, Bud Fox (Charles Sheen], who prizes his integrity more than he does profit. In the first Star Wars film, victory is presented as the triumph of individuality over the machine Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) tums off his computerized gunsight and uses the Force to guide him in the aiming of the missiles that destroy the Death Star. Even in Schindler's List Spielberg, 1993}, a film that exam- ines the greatest villainy ever perpetrated by the corporate state—the Holocaust—the individual, Oscar Schindler, can still make a difference. ‘The innocence and homespun values associated with the rustic heroes of Capra films have tended to give way in recent American films to more worldly, sophisticated, and cynical characters, such as Fox and Schindler. But those values and characters of the past occasionally make a comeback. The central character of Forrest Gump (Zemeckis, 1994), a mentally handicapped American version of Voleaire’s Candide, embodies the beliefs ofthe traditional populist hero. The values of the world around ‘Gump change in response to the social and political turmoil of the 1960s (the civil rights movement, drugs, sex, Vietnam), the 1970s (the political corruption symbolized by Watergate}, and the 1980s the AIDS epidemic}.“ Jeb Belton But Gump's convictions remain constant, he adheres to the simple ‘maxims taught to him by his mother. He is not stupid because he knows that “stupid is as stupid does” and he avoids doing stupid things. His optimism is conveyed through another saying he learned from his mother: “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get.” His honesty, integrity, sexual innocence, naive optimism, and devoted loyalty to friends and family look back to the utopian small town America envisioned by populist ideology. Populist and progressive thought constructed an ideal agrarian, small town America, rejecting the reality of an America that was grad- ually becoming industrialized and urbanized. During the 1940s, that which populist and progressive ideology sought to repress began to return. It came back in the form of film noir, a countercurrent within the mainstream of classical Hollywood cinema. And it reappeared as a nightmarish inversion of the earlier dream, as a distortion of the reality of an industrialized and urbanized America. ‘The film that best illustrates the rupture that took place in the contimuity of American identity at this time is Capra's It’s a Wonderful Life. The film begins with trouble in populist paradise: George Bailey (James Stewart}, a character who epitomizes such traditional values as hard work, fragality, honesty, good-neighborliness, self-sufficiency, egal itarianism, common sense, and moral sincerity, is about to commit suicide. The film reviews Bailey's heroic efforts to combat the evils of big business, special interest groups, commercialism, cynicism, and corruption, and it documents his self-sacrifice on behalf of his community. Near the end of the film, Capra shows his hero what his home. town, Bedford Falls, would have become if he had never lived. Bedford Falls has now become “Pottersville,” named after Bailey's nemesis, the greedy banker, who represents the destructive forces of big business and industrialization. The town has become a monstrous mirror image of its former self and is no longer the populist ideal it once was. There are no families, homes, or smal] businesses. Its inhabitants are depraved, cyni cal, bitter, alienated from one another, and depressed. Realizing that his life has made a difference (it has prevented Bedford Falls from becoming “Pottersville”, Bailey abandons his plans to kill himself, Pottersville disappears, and the utopian fantasy world of Bedford Falls returns. Like the “Pottersville” sequence, film noir was the bad dream of postwar American cinema. The box office hits ofthe period, such as Meet ‘Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944), presented a portrait of an idyllic, small town America, Minnelli’s tintype vision of St. Louis in 1903 celebrates1s Inivaduction a preindustrial community of families and individuals, whose integrity is preserved by a refusal of the modem (instead of moving to New York City, the family remains "right here in our hometown}. The St. Louis World's Fait, which provides a narrative focus for the film, symbolizes the industrial advancement of the twentieth century, with its display of the latest developments in modem technology. Fittingly, the fair itself remains off-screen and unseen. During the 1970s, America rediscovered film noir, in part, as a result of Paul Schrader's seminal “Notes on Film Noir.” In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, the social and political vision of film noir spoke to the sense of cynicism and alienation that circulated within popular culture. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), which was written by Schrader, presents a vision of America that is decidedly dark. New York City is portrayed as an urban inferno, inhabited by a disaffected and alienated populace that has surrendered itself to the crime and corruption brought about by industrialization and urbanization. The populist candidate for political office, Sen. Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris}, pretends to speak on behalf of the people (his motto is “We Are the People”), But he is seen as phony and opportunistic. Lacking the coherence of the traditional hero, the film’s central character, Vietnam veteran and taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro}, has no clearly defined goals and does not know what he wants. He is both attracted and repulsed by what he sees, He desires the traditional ‘American ideal—the upper-middle-class, blonde heroine Betsy (Cybill Shepherd); buthe then redefines his goal, dedicating himself to the rescue of the teenage prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster). He initially seems intent on assassinating Palantine, yet then abruptly redirects his hostility toward pimp (Harvey Keitel) ‘The film ends with an assertion of coherence where there is none. In killing the pimp and his underworld associates, Travis becomes a hero But his elevation to the status of hero in the media is clearly the result of a misreading of his actions. His incoherent violence is given meaning and coherence by the media, He becomes a progressive reformer despite himself, Like film noir, films such as Taxi Driver represent the dark underside of populist and progressive ideology. They envision the conse- ‘quences of an industrialization and urbanization that have run amuck; they depict the alienation of the individual within mass society. They tum populist and progressive ideology inside out, providing a realization of its worst nightmares. The boundaries of the American cinema are16 Jen Baton defined by these two diametrically opposed visions of the American experience. And each of these visions—one utopian, the other dysto- pian—cannot exist without the other; they are the product of a single, yet nonetheless complex psyche—the American psyche. Like the flashback structure of Citizen Kane, which portrays its central character through the prism of separate and distinct points of view, this anthology is a composite of different perspectives on a single subject—the relationship of American movies to mass culture. Its por trait of this subject is, asa result, fragmentary, but a portrait nonetheless gradually emerges, forming cumulatively as the reader moves from essay to essay. In “Apocalyptic Cinema,” Lary May views Griffith as represen- tative of a nineteenth-century, Protestant, Victorian order that was in danger of collapsing in response to the onslaught of economic and social change. Griffith used the cinema, a form of mass culture, to rescue Victorianism and Anglo-Saxon culture from modemity. Presented as a figure of progressive reform, Griffith used the motion picture to convey ‘moral lessons, to lift “mankind from animality,” and to warn his audi- ences against the threats posed to their moral virtue by the crumbling of the codes and culture of the past. Nineteenth-century individualism was grounded in a Victorian sense of moral virtue, One person was distinguished from another on the basis of essential worth. In “The Crowd, the Collective, and the Chorus,” Martin Rubin examines the way that the notion of individuality changes in American cinema from the 1920s to the 1930s. Looking at The Crowd {1928} anda series of Busby Berkeley musicals, Rubin traces the evolution of the relationship between the individual and the mass from the “rugged individualism” of “expansionist, laissez-faire American capitalism of the 1865-1929 period” to the reconfirmation of the individual within the mass by means of a temporary loss of individuality that dominates notions of individualism in the 1930s. Between 1860 and 1890, the American economy began to shift from that of a society of producers to that of a society of consumers. ‘As Charles Eckert points out in “The Carole Lombard in Macy's Win- dow,” motion pictures functioned as transitory display windows for ‘twentieth-century American goods. Film viewers were addressed by the movies as potential consumers who might want to buy the clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and other consumer products featured in Holly ‘wood films. The studios negotiated contracts with major companies such as General Electric, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Lux Soap, and Maxwell‘American ner dysto- fa single, ortrays its points of nasingle . Its por: netheless rom essay represen- at was in and social to rescue nted as a ‘convey his audi- mbling of Victorian teron the Chorus,” changes we Crowd wwolution, “rugged sm of the ithin the >minates 1 to shift umers.4 y's Win. dows for vod by the slothing, a Holly: ties such, Maxwell v7 Invoction House to plug their products, receiving, in turn, free advertising for their films. At the same time, Hollywood films became increasingly driven by the consumerism that dominated the American economy. Eckert notes that women enjoy a dominant role in the purchase of consumer items. Mary Ann Doane builds on this notion to reverse notions of the woman as passive commodity and to empower female viewers as active consumers. On one level, female spectators “buy” images of themselves in the form of female stars, thus participating in the commodification of the image of woman. On another, they buy the products that have been placed in motion pictures. On yet another, ‘women consume the stories that classical Hollywood cinema provides them, In all instances, women are sold “a certain image of femininity.” This image becomes an object that the female spectator is programmed to desire, The regulation of desire in classical Hollywood cinema finds its ‘most literal representation in “The Production Code,” a list of guidelines adopted by the film industry in 1930 to ensure that the content of motion pictures remained “wholesome” and to forestall, through self-censorship, the threat of federal, state, and/or local censorship. More than any other text, the Production Code dramatizes the potential power of the cinema as an instrument of social reform—at least, as it was perceived by religious and other civic organizations concerned with public morality. Written by Martin Quigley, a Catholic layman and publisher of the trade journal Motion Picture Herald, and Rev. Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit professor at the University of St. Louis, the Production Code established the boundaries for on-screen behavior from 1930 to the mid-1950s when the code was successfully challenged by independent filmmakers who sought to bring a new, more adult content to the screen. Before it was relaxed, the Production Code played a significant role in the creation of a new kind of cinema, film noir. Writers and directors interested in dealing with forbidden themes, that is, with the “immoral” content prohibited by the code, discovered ways of alluding, to taboo material without directly violating the code. Of course, “ma- ture” themes, such as crime, violence, and sexuality, do find their way into serious dramas of the pre-code {ie., pre-1934) and post-code/prewar [1934-1941) period. But these themes tend to be alluded to tastefully, at least in the post-code period. Film noir, however, sought to exploit prohibited material without actually showing it. Thus, acts of sadism or sexual depravity took place off screen, contributing to a sense of fear and Paranoia on screen. Low-Key lighting and claustrophobic framing con-18 sh Beton cealed and/or disguised taboo subjects. In his seminal essay on film noir, Paul Schrader views noir as the product of postwar American cynicism, pessimism, and disillusionment. Noir emerges as a break with Holly- ‘wood tradition: its subject matter was more realistic than that found in the standard 1930s drama. Its stylistic practices were more visible and ‘more intrusive than the transparent lighting, editing, framing, and cam- era style of classical Hollywood cinema Film noir’s violation of the narrative and stylistic conventions that dominated classical Hollywood cinema reflect transformations in the social onder of postwar America, Sylvia Harvey examines noir in terms of the changing status of women during and after the Second World War, At the start of the war, women moved out of the home and into the workplace, where they filledin for their fathers, husbands, and boyfriends ‘who were in the armed forces. At the end of the war, many women hoped to continue working and to retain their new-found economic and social independence. Men tended to view these new roles for women asa threat to traditional notions of women and to the integrity of the family. This, fear surfaces in film noir in the form of femmes fatales, destructive career ‘women, and absent or dysfunctional families. Eckert and Doane point to the intimate relationship between film audiences and consumerism. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson looks at American cinema of the 1970s as a postmodern phenomenon that reflects the sense of alienation and frag- mentation brought about by late capitalism. Modernist art works re- sponded to the advent of the machine age and mass society, which threatened the uniqueness of the individual with the anonymity of mass production and mass consumption, by asserting the integrity and creati ity of the artist. Revolting against tradition, modernist artists sought to say something new and different, to be original in a world dominated by mechanical reproduction(s). Postmodernism represents a reaction to modernism, It refuses to make the traditional distinctions drawn by modernists and premodernists between high culture and popular culture. In terms of stylistic practices, postmodem artists rely on pastiche. Pastiche is a form of imitation of the unique style or content of earlier works that lacks any trace of the satire or parody that characterizes traditional forms of imitation. Postmodern works also acknowledge the primary obstacle con- fronting contemporary artists—the inability to say anything that has not already been said. If traditional filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Alired Hitchcock, or Orson Welles invented ways of expressing ideas through theme: could c situatic tic” ©9 allusion the fai for the return, of the is toda Postme cexperie phenor discont sequen the soc the inc social, traditic black r validat Father for Mr. certain directo anxiety patrian ishness wonder effects. They a Most in Butma more dfilm noir, rth Holly- at found in visible and \, and cam: onventions nations in tes noir in ‘ond World ad into the boyfriends nen hoped and social asathreat ily. This tive career 2 between Consumer 1970s as a 1 and frag- works re- ty, which ty ofmass adcreativ. sought to rinated by saction to drawn by arculture, pastiche. of earlier racterizes tacle con- at has not th, Alfred $ through 9 riod the medium of the cinema, postmodern directors such as Brian De Palma could only draw on a pre-existent dictionary of shots, character types, situations, themes, and meanings to express themselves. The “authen- tic” expression of ideas in the past has thus given way to quotation and allusion to that authentic expression. Jameson relates this inability to be original, which he refers to as “the failure of the new,” to another feature of postmodernism—nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia films, such as American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973}, return spectators from the incoherence of the present to the coherenes of the past. In this idyllic past, the self was whole, not fragmented as it is today, and unified with, not alienated from, a larger community Postmodern works reflect the schizophrenic breakdown of the normal experience of the world as a continuous, coherent, and meaningful phenomenon. These works consist of a series of “isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence.” Postmodem artists thus convey the incoherence that informs the social and cultural reality of contemporary experience. Robin Wood has written at length about 1970s cinema, noting the incoherence ofits “texts” and linking that incoherence to a series of social, political, and cultural events that undermined the stability of traditional authority of patriarchal institutions. Vietnam, Watergate, the black militant movement, feminism, gay liberation, and other protest movements “questionfed] authority, ... the entire social structure that validated it, ... patriarchy, . .. social institutions, the family, [and] the Father interiorized as superego.”** For Wood, this questioning can be scen in “incoherent texts,” such as Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976], Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Brooks, 1977), and Cruising (Friedkin, 1980} In “Papering the Cracks,” Wood looks at the way in which certain 1970s “coherent texts,” such as those films produced and/or directed by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, address the sociopolitical anxiety of 1970s America to reassure audiences that “the system” of Patriarchal capitalism still works. Films of reassurance embrace child- ishness, providing a regression to infantilism and childlike state of wonder. They dazzle the eyes and the cars with spectacular special effects. Their sense of invention, imagination, and originality is facile. They allay nuclear anxiety and endorse a fascist submission to authority. Most important, they restore and reaffirm the authority of the father. Hollywood films confirm and/or resist the dominant ideology. But mainstream culture carries within it several subcultures that support more diverse cultural activities. Clyde Taylor situates independent Afro-2 Join Balin American filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s within the unique tradi- tions of Afro-American art. He identifies a new generation of university- trained, black American filmmakers, who draw on Afro-American oral traditions, black music, and Italian neorealism to produce a cinema that more effectively expresses black experience than was ever possible within classical Hollywood cinema. For Taylor, the work of Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Haile Gerima, Charles Lane, Ben Caldwell, War- ington Hudlin, and others “has managed a transformation of imagina- tive possibilities comparable in scope, diversity, and creative verse” to that of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Black audiences can engage with mainstream, white, Hollywood ‘cinema, but that engagement comes at a tremendous cost. In identifying ‘with white characters or with black stereotypes, blacks are disempowered. bell hooks describes what happens to black female spectators as a form of “saslighting.” They are forced to become complicit in their own repression, to deny who they are. Traditionally, blacks have been pun- ished for “looking back” at whites. hooks proposes a form oflooking back at the cinema—a look that she refers to as “the oppositional gaze”— which disables the cinema's power by questioning and interrogating it. This oppositional gaze, in turn, can empower not only the black male spectator, who like white males already enjoys possession of the gaze, but also the black female spectator, who is traditionally denied the power of the gaze. Active and critical in her looking, the black female spectator refuses identification with on-screen women, whether black and white. In watching, she resists what she sees; through this resistance, she constructs herself as an active subject. She does not just look; she looks back. The collection of essays in this anthology is designed not only to look at the phenomenon of American cinema but also to “look back” at it, The book's goal is to provoke thought, to ask questions, and to provide a variety of different perspectives from which various portraits of main- stream American commercial cinema can be constructed and recon- structed. As hooks suggests, empowerment within mass society begins with active and critical engagement with mass culture. If mass culture produces movies that produce us, we, in tum, also produce the mass culture that produces us. Our sense of agency depends on our ability to understand the role that we, as active consumers and engaged audiences, have played (and can play] in the construction of an American identity. ‘The essays in this book attempt to describe the relationship between the movies and mass culture and, by doing this, to give readers a sense of thei first (Nev Hare 198e Unis Prin edge 192 Holl and Proa wa inde thee 195¢ Ame Row cnt Rich Blac 197;ral rat ble les to vod ing ck ale tor ite. she oks ito vat ‘ide on. rto 2es, ity. the 2 of 2 Inivducton their own place within the operations of this mass medium, This » first step in the creation of a truly populist and progressive cinema, NOTES 1. Andre Bazin, "La Politique des Auteurs," in Peter Graham, ed, The New Wave (sew York: Doubleday, 1968, p. 182 2. On the way the practice of science remains vulnerable to ideology, see Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism |Ithaca, N-Y.: Cornell Univesity Press, 1986), Evelye Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science |New Haven, Conn. Yale University Pres, 1985); Bruno Latour and Steve Woalgat, Laboratory Life[Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1986 [1979]} or Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Know edge Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universiey Press, 1990) 3. lan Jarvie, Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 |New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 4. David Bordwell dates the dominance of “the classical model” (or the classical Hollywood style} to 1917, by which point it had evolved into an efficient, relatively seamless, coherent, and systematic made of narration, See David Bordwell, Jenee Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 5. Non-Hollywood, non-nareative films (experimental or avantgarde ils, doc ‘mentares, amateur films, ee) and certain independently made narretivefilms [racefilms, say and lesbian films, ethnic and minority films, etc resist dominant ideologies, drawing ‘on countercurrents within the mainstream. Thus, as David James has argued, certain independent productions ofthe late 1950s, such as Shadows and Pull My Daisy draw on ‘the culture ofthe Beat Generation rather than onthe dominant culture of Ameria in the 1950s, See his Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press, 1989) 6. George McKenna, "Populism: The American cology," in Geomge McKenna, ‘American Populism (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974], pp. xi 7. Jelirey Richards, “The Ideology of Populism,” in Visions of Yesterday (London: oul 8 Kegan Paul 1973). 231 ‘Richards, "Wdeology of Populism," p. 223 9: Richa Hotes The ge of Reform (New York: Ving, 1960962 10. McKenna, “Populism,” p. xvi. 11. Richards, "Ideology of Populism,” p.231 12>-Shetdow Hackney, “Introduction,” in Sheldow Hackney, od, Populism: The (Critical lsues (Boston: Lite, Brown, 1971), p. 13, Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 7. 14. Hackney, “introduction,” vii 15. MeKenns, “Populism,” pp. xviii, x1, xxi, 16, Jetirey Richards refers to Christ a8 "the ultimate prototype” of the populist hero, Richards, "ideology of Populism,” pp. 234-5. 17. See Thomas Cripps, "The Year of The Birth of 2 Nation,” in Slow Fade to ‘Black: The Nogzo in Ametican Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 41-68. 1. Bryan as quoted in Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Nareotive Film (Urbana: University of Hlinois Press, 1991, p. 2412 John Baion 19. Gnifith was intrigued by progzessivist thought and, as Gunning has noted, once preferred to describe himself as a “jourmalist” rather than a “director.” Gun ning, D. W. Griffith, p. 50, For Griffith, film was an agent of reform, 20, Holstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 193-4, 21. Thi, p 186. 22. thi, p. 202. 23. thi, p28. 24. Richards, “Ideology of Populism,” p. 229. 25, Holstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 5-6 26. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, pp. 151-5. 27. Richard Schickel, D. W. Grifith: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1985) 283 28. Schickel, D. W. Gufith, pp. 282-93, 29. MeKenna, "Populist," p. xi 30. Richards, "Wdeology of Populism,” pp. 234-5. 31 hid 32. The Cahiers du cinema essay on Young Me. Lincoln refers to the “moralizing Aiscourse” of Ford’ Lincoln, However, this sore of discourse is not unique to Ford—or to Lincoln but emerges as a feature of certain kinds of populist heroes in American cinema, See Editors of Cahiers du cinema, “John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln,” in Philip Rosen, ed, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Pres, 1986], pp. 456-7. ‘38. David Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” in Philip Rosen, ed, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p18. ‘34. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 77 35, Robin Wood, “The Incoherent Text: Narrative inthe 70s," in Hollywood from ‘Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 49-50.